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In the latest two episodes of Rob's Basement he playtests the post apocalyptic game PunkApocalyptic rpg. https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/robsbasement/episodes/2018-03-05T17_22_11-08_00 https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/robsbasement/episodes/2018-03-11T07_58_28-07_00 http://schwalbentertainment.com/2017/08/22/punkapocalyptic-roleplaying-game/
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Mar 15, 2018 02:04
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Wew, that new supplement they put out, Scions of the Betrayer, is edgyyyyy. Not really liking it because it crosses the line from gory tongue-in-cheek B-movie stuff to just being gross and tedious.
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Mar 20, 2018 15:21
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Yeah as good as Schwalb is at making a system, he can be just as cringy sometimes. I listened to the first episode of his podcast and it wasn't as bad as it could've been but it was a little much for me.
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Mar 20, 2018 15:29
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SunAndSpring posted:Wew, that new supplement they put out, Scions of the Betrayer, is edgyyyyy. Not really liking it because it crosses the line from gory tongue-in-cheek B-movie stuff to just being gross and tedious. Definitely avoid "Horrific Parasites" and "Wretched and Unclean" then.
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Mar 20, 2018 16:18
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Pharmaskittle posted:Yeah as good as Schwalb is at making a system, he can be just as cringy sometimes. I listened to the first episode of his podcast and it wasn't as bad as it could've been but it was a little much for me.
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Mar 20, 2018 16:42
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I suppose I should get off my rear end and actually put together a normie hack that removes all the more objectionable aspects of the game.
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Mar 20, 2018 17:03
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The only parts that seemed too exxxtreme were the backgrounds. "I drowned a baby in piss" is something I would laugh in a player's face for, and approaches self-parody for SotDL. Overall Scions of the Betrayer seemed pretty on brand to me, but I also routinely ignore anything that isn't an explicit statblock, spell, item, or character path. What I am annoyed about is that Darklings don't feel super materially different from Cambions.
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Mar 20, 2018 17:12
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Some of the stuff on the random tables in the corebook are eye-rollingly dumb. "Okay, so you all meet in a tavern..." "Does the tavern have windows?" "Sure. So anyway, this old guy with a treasure map..." "I chuck this jar full of spit out the window."
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Mar 20, 2018 17:17
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dwarf74 posted:Ditto. It really brought me back to the days when I had written this game off entirely. I'd heard an interview with Schwalb and he was, like, hyper-focused on stuff like the poop spells and orcs with giant boners. The "centipede in the urethra" bit he talked about in one of those interviews shows up in this, funnily enough. I'm not really terribly offended or what have you by the edgier stuff, it's just really ludicrously dumb and not scary or shocking. Like, I think that scene in the VVitch where the witch kills that baby is very shocking, but that's because it's so sudden and unexpected. SotDL keeps tipping its loving hand constantly and that just lets you build a tolerance. So when you get to the "drowning a baby in pee" thing you're just bored and wondering "Man I already got past the monster that implants its eggs in you and the curse that makes your dick rot off, this is nothing".
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Mar 20, 2018 22:18
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I F&Fed Carcosa. Nothing can break me now.
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Mar 20, 2018 22:21
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SunAndSpring posted:The "centipede in the urethra" bit he talked about in one of those interviews shows up in this, funnily enough. I think that concept of tolerance is really what I've experienced with SotDL. There's only so many times my cock can turn into 666 worms that speak in antisemitic screeds before it just becomes boring. Thankfully SotDL has super tight mechanics that I love so it's very easy to look past the 2edgy bullshit and laugh at the impregnation torture stuff.
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Mar 21, 2018 04:02
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Still would rather play Shadow of the Demon Lord rather than D&D 5e or Pathfinder. The latter two are the only games stocked by my FLGS sadly. 
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Mar 21, 2018 04:24
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yea the game is extremely good and very easy to just edit around the edgy poo poo to stick to more basic body horror and all. My group's a bunch of horror nerds so we have no issue ignoring/retooling 'your butt explodes in a bunch of roaches and they all have gross drippy eye holes for eyes and they fly directly into the nearest dick they can find' stuff into more general 'your back has grown a disgusting flesh-hive of clearly infernal gnats and beetles that fly in and out'. "A centipede crawls out your dick every time you piss" is maybe the funniest thing I've read in these books though. I can't even be mad that's just hilarious.
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Mar 21, 2018 04:35
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Yeah when I run published adventures I try to keep things close to Evil Dead 2/Braindead in tone. It's not hard to turn horror into comedy (and in fact I can't even do horror as a GM), and the grossout over-the-top edgy poo poo in SotDL lends itself to funny situations. "Feast of the Father" has a scene where an entire village of people gorge themselves on rotting food and then poo poo out hundreds of gross arm-length worms in a town-wide diarrhea fit which is just something I could not describe with a straight face.
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Mar 21, 2018 12:35
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 that's a loving mental image right there
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Mar 21, 2018 12:51
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It be like that sometimes
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Mar 21, 2018 13:38
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Of course there is some stuff that I just wouldn't use. There is another adventure called "Forbidden Fruits" wherein a group of insane cultists have taken over a town after becoming infected by insanely toxic bramble bushes and devoting themselves to the worship of a weird bull god. In the tower, they have a minotaur that they have cut the arms and legs off of and you're supposed to imply that the female cultists have been attempting to use the minotaur to create something in the image of their bull-headed god. I read that and was like, yeah... no, that's not something relevant to the larger adventure nor something I can make funny and it's not getting used.
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Mar 21, 2018 13:46
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They could be biologists who are taking cuttings and trying to grow the things.
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Mar 21, 2018 14:32
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Yea maybe they're grafting minotaur bits onto themselves, but it's like 90% the human bits so it's just a lady with one weirdly beefy arm
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Mar 21, 2018 15:36
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Couldn't they just tie him down? Why'd they have to cut the arms and legs off? It's still torturous because like, he's *really* tired.
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Mar 21, 2018 15:42
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Couldn't they just tie him down? Why'd they have to cut the arms and legs off? It's still torturous because like, he's *really* tired. the real twist is the minotaur is into some DEEPLY hosed up stuff and the party is kinkshaming him.
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Mar 21, 2018 15:58
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Just for the other side of things, let's talk about stuff we like in Shadow's setting, because I do think they do a good job when not being edgelords. The Hell book, for example, is solid. There's some dumb stuff (a literal ocean of blood cannot be invoked without the Metalocolypse joke coming to ming, I'm sorry), but they have some clever ideas. I really like them explicitly saying in SotDL world 'Angels' are absolutely demons who's job it is to prey on the overly pious and superior to tempt them to do evil for their faith. That's super on brand and makes for a good twist to pull in an adventure and all. They also did a good job making Hell properly tempting. Yea you lose your soul and probably will explode in maggots or whatever, but it's also the only actual reliable way for Johnny Peasant to get a lot of money/power quickly in a hosed up world. It lends itself to both crazy infernal enemies and fallen mortals who may have had good intents or just been victims of Hell's games. Also I like that The Devil is just kinda aloof and withdrawn in his crazy skull tower and most of the cults around him are just the other major players trying to get more power using his name and all.
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Mar 21, 2018 16:14
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The stuff around the fey and the old gods, and the stuff related to the orc king are both pretty interesting and good enough that they've made me want to actually play in the SotDL setting instead of reskinning everything for WFRP. Other than the poopmaggots, the main thing I don't like about the setting is the fact that the cities are all incredibly one-note the way they're described in the core book, which makes the setting feel distinctly artificial. The Nine Cities are especially crap, here. "Here's the city of slavers! Here's the city of drugs! Here's the city of bankers! Here's the city run by assassins!" Those should all be one city.
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Mar 21, 2018 17:18
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Lemon-Lime posted:The stuff around the fey and the old gods, and the stuff related to the orc king are both pretty interesting and good enough that they've made me want to actually play in the SotDL setting instead of reskinning everything for WFRP. If I were to fix it, I would keep the lore and name the same, but actually have them be a sprawling megalopolis with the Nine Cities being more like districts or boroughs. So they each retain their gimmick, but they're all part of this huge, dying urban sprawl of in-fill and lawless abandoned neighborhoods.
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Mar 21, 2018 17:22
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"a human child" on the fey interesting thing list is pretty funny to me in the way a baby drowned in piss is not I also really like pixies being invisible, except they are visible during certain times, and visible to children and animals/beasts. Bizarre and thematic.
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Mar 21, 2018 17:24
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Fey and other magical creatures being sociopathic weirdos and distinctly nonheroic is something I always go in for. The story of the Betrayer is actually decently tragic and feels resonant with the themes of Urth. I also dig that the Desolation is the aftermath of a war between trolls and faeries.
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Mar 21, 2018 17:56
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I'm personally okay with all the "edgy" poo poo being played straight. There's naturally the issue of desensitization through overload, so pacing and presentation matters, but by and large the books' various ideas are serviceable for conveying a gross, hosed up world: the Shadow of the Demon Lord is gradually turning Urth, an already rather unwholesome place, into a living nightmare.
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Mar 21, 2018 19:33
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I'm planning on DMing it by saying a lot of the poo poo in the book is written by a contemporary in-world 'historian' (i.e. full of here be dragons / exoticism bullshit). So the fairly normal city where a certain drug is a socially acceptable and popularly consumed gets reported back through various travellers and becomes 'this whole city is nothing but druggies'. If the players actually go there, they discover the grain of truth in the pile of rumours. Also tweaking to get rid of Schwalb's obsession with dicks & turds. Because, I mean, why?
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Mar 22, 2018 04:31
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Are you guys like lore lawyered by your players with the books in hand? Just do your usual D&D ad hoc bullshit and steal the bits you like.
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Mar 22, 2018 09:56
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Lichtenstein posted:Are you guys like lore lawyered by your players with the books in hand? Just do your usual D&D ad hoc bullshit and steal the bits you like. Part of the issue is that, at least with DnD you can hand most people the setting books and then say "we're going to take this, except for this and this" but SotDL is a bit harder to do that with. That said, it's only a problem if you actually use the basic setting material that way instead of just picking what you like and not bothering with handing the players those books.
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Mar 22, 2018 10:12
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Still GMing a campaign in SOTDL, and I gotta say the combat system is tedious because it's so simple. What do you guys do to spice it up?
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Mar 22, 2018 11:04
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Hollandia posted:Also tweaking to get rid of Schwalb's obsession with dicks & turds. Because, I mean, why? Historically dicks and turds have been very funny.
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Mar 22, 2018 11:14
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Tias posted:Still GMing a campaign in SOTDL, and I gotta say the combat system is tedious because it's so simple. What do you guys do to spice it up? Huh, haven't really found the combat to be tedious so far... the players quickly picks up a couple tricks, and the monsters usually have at least one gimmick each to put a spin on things. Haven't heard any complaints from the players about the combat yet (except for that one time I rolled randomly for enemies, and they got 6 large animals + some beastmen, which was a little bit too much for them).
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Mar 22, 2018 12:31
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Tias posted:Still GMing a campaign in SOTDL, and I gotta say the combat system is tedious because it's so simple. What do you guys do to spice it up?
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Mar 22, 2018 12:39
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No abstract stuff, no. Perhaps I'm bad at handling encounters.
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Mar 22, 2018 12:41
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Tias posted:No abstract stuff, no. Perhaps I'm bad at handling encounters. Try adding roles to enemies that can think well enough to be tactical. That adds some more complexity.
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Mar 22, 2018 12:46
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Tias posted:No abstract stuff, no. Perhaps I'm bad at handling encounters. I think that the combat's simplicity is a strength of the system. It allows you to move at a decent clip and not get bogged down. If you want to spice it up, offer the PCs incentives to use their maneuvers or something. All the paths get pretty decent gimmicks as well, so look at the players' sheets and make things that play to those gimmicks.
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Mar 22, 2018 12:47
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Also what level are your PCs at? I have one party at level 4 and one at level 8 and while combat runs really smooth for both, the master level characters have a lot more in the way of tricks and bullshit. I've never found the combat to be tedious though. The rapid pace makes things very snappy so every move a monster pulls out should ideally add a new wrinkle to the scenario. Are you using special powers for monsters to full effect? You can also just cheat and make a monster cast a spell or spell-like effect.
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Mar 22, 2018 12:57
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Yeah I am kind of surprised by how quickly characters' complexity ramps up. One of my players made a flowchart for her Salamander/Warrior/Berserker to keep track of all of it.
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Mar 22, 2018 14:45
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I feel the game really benefits from speeding up to or even starting at level 3, so characters have a full suite of options.
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Mar 22, 2018 15:17
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